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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577691">on leading the gift-horse to water (and other mangled metaphors)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Ominous_Owl/pseuds/The_Ominous_Owl'>The_Ominous_Owl</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supergirl (TV 2015)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Mentions of homophobia, Sort Of, but some light angst cos i don't know how to not, does it still count as fake dating if they don't know they're doing it?, idiots to lovers, in which i twist the timeline like a pretzel and smoosh the best bits together, lena/nia(ish?), no actual homophobia though, no fighting just love, oh my god they were roommates, we're kondoing the canon like it's 2019</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:47:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,851</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577691</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Ominous_Owl/pseuds/The_Ominous_Owl</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Lena gets a girlfriend. Kara hates her instantly. It’s probably not a problem.<br/>or<br/>the one where kara learns not to judge a room by its elephant.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>166</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1914</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>on leading the gift-horse to water (and other mangled metaphors)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>so this is a thing that i wrote. pls know that this is a very silly fic.</p>
<p>mostly inspired by <a href="https://the-ominous-owl.tumblr.com/post/629854320965337088/weeaaboohoo-imagine-your-otp">this tumblr post</a>.</p>
<p>also everyone say thank you to lostchips who read this first, ages ago, and pointed out that it wasn't actually terrible</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>i. a worm in the hand and the early bird in the bush</strong>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“I think I might be homophobic.”</p>
<p>Alex jolts awake and jerks upright. Her hair – sleep-tousled and spiking up at odd angles – only adds to her air of sleepy confusion as she blinks at Kara where she’s hovering – both figuratively and literally – at the end of her bed and asks, “You what?”</p>
<p>“I think I might be homophobic,” Kara says again, twisting her hands together over her stomach. The word is bitter on her tongue, and she’s almost vibrating with anxiety, but Alex doesn’t react with the horror Kara was expecting. Instead, she just flops back down with a groan and feels blindly over the pillow for her phone.</p>
<p>“Kara, it’s like—” she squints at the screen with one eye scrunched shut against the light, “—one-thirty in the morning. Are you currently bleeding or on fire?”</p>
<p>“No, but—”</p>
<p>“Then can this please wait until morning?” Alex asks plaintively, fumbling to tug the covers back over herself. “I spent most of yesterday teaching the rookies how to throw punches without breaking their hands. I’m sore.”</p>
<p>“Oh, yeah. Of course. Sorry.” Kara turns to leave, but only gets halfway to the door before her inner turmoil whirls her around again. “You’d still love me, right? If I was homophobic? Because I really don’t want to be, but it feels like the sort of thing you can’t help and I’m really trying.”</p>
<p>Alex groans into her pillow and mutters something muffled that sounds like swearing before she wriggles to the side and holds the covers open, the invitation clear. Kara zips to the side of the bed, but freezes at Alex’s grumbled, “Shoes off, weirdo. You’ll get my sheets dirty.”</p>
<p>“I’m not wearing shoes,” Kara mutters, and Alex’s eyes pop open again to look at her sister properly.</p>
<p>“Did you fly here? In your pyjamas?” she asks incredulously. “Kara, I swear…” </p>
<p>“It was an emergency!” Kara protests, earning herself an exasperated eye-roll.</p>
<p>“Just get in the bed.”</p>
<p>Kara pouts but slips into the bed next to Alex, sinking into her sister’s warmth and burrowing under the covers until her head is just poking out.</p>
<p>Alex shifts and wriggles, grumbling under her breath about lying in the cold spot, but after a moment she stills with a sigh. Propping herself up on an elbow, she twists her body to face Kara and asks, “So what put this ridiculous idea in your head?”</p>
<p>“It’s not ridiculous, it’s just—” Alex glares at her, impatience in every inch of her expression, and Kara relents. “Lena has a girlfriend. I don’t like it,” she mutters.</p>
<p>Alex’s face does something complicated, like it’s trying to emote several things at once, before it snaps into something that resembles careful sympathy. “Okay. Well, I have a girlfriend. Sort of. You’re okay with that, right?” she asks after a long pause.</p>
<p>The question is the rock that starts the avalanche of all the anxiety swimming through Kara’s head. “Of course I am! But what if my acceptance is conditional? What if I’m only okay with it because you’re my sister? Oh, what if I’m like those parents who hate gay people and then have gay children and have to twist it in their head to be okay with it and then resent them when they come out and get married because they have to act happy and supportive when really they think it’s an offence against nature and—”</p>
<p>“Kara,” Alex says, catching Kara’s twisting hands to keep them still. “You’re freaking out. Breathe.”</p>
<p>“But—”</p>
<p>“<em>Breathe.”</em></p>
<p>Kara breathes, in and out, matching Alex’s slow rhythm until the words don’t feel like they’re clawing at her throat.</p>
<p>“Better?” Alex asks, and Kara nods slowly. “Good. Okay.” She releases Kara’s hands and sinks back onto her side of the bed. “So that was a lot.”</p>
<p>“Sorry.”</p>
<p>“It’s okay. Let’s just… start at the start. What happened?”</p>
<p>“Lena brought someone back to the apartment. A woman. And they were drunk and laughing and holding hands and it felt…” Bad. Wrong. Like worms squirming through her stomach and fingernails clawing at her heart<em>.</em> “I don’t know. I just didn’t like it.”</p>
<p>Alex’s face does the thing again, and Kara squints through the darkness, trying to decipher the expression.</p>
<p>“So Lena came home with someone,” Alex says after a long moment. There’s a tone in her voice that matches the strange expression on her face, and Kara blinks at her slowly for a moment before answering.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“And she was a <em>she</em>.”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p> “And it made you uncomfortable in a way you didn’t really understand.”</p>
<p>“<em>Yes</em>.” That’s the perfect way to describe it, the way just thinking about seeing Lena, giddy and giggling, stumbling into their apartment with her hand wrapped around a stranger’s. <em>Uncomfortable.</em></p>
<p>“And the <em>only</em> reason you could think of was that you had… some sort of latent homophobic tendencies?”</p>
<p>Kara just nods, hoping Alex can see it in the darkness. She’s still waiting for the horror, for the recriminations, for her sister to tell her she’s a terrible person and banish her from her apartment, but Alex doesn’t do that.</p>
<p>Instead, she just flops back on to her back and brings her hand up to pinch the bridge of her nose with a sigh. “Okay,” Alex says, sounding oddly long-suffering. “Has she brought people home before?”</p>
<p>“She usually warns me first, after I walked in on her and Jack that time.” Kara blushes at the memory, thankful that the darkness hides it from Alex. Returning home to find her roommate half-naked on their shared couch had been An Experience. Kara had squeaked out an apology and rapidly about-faced back out of the apartment, returning reluctantly almost four hours later to an alone-and-profusely-apologetic Lena, who’d promised to send her a message next time. Still, Kara had trouble looking either of them in the eye, and she couldn’t help but be relieved when they broke up just over a week later.</p>
<p>“Are you sure this woman was her girlfriend, then?” Alex asks, propping herself up on her elbow again and pulling Kara’s attention away from the memory.</p>
<p>“I don’t think it being a one-night-stand makes it better,” Kara mutters, but Alex shakes her head.</p>
<p>“No, I mean if she normally warns you, maybe she’s just a friend.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think she expected me to be there. She looked surprised to see me.” Alarmed is closer to the truth. The expression on Lena’s face when she’d spilled into the apartment – smelling strongly of the expensive scotch she favours, tugging an attractive brunette behind her and laughing up until she’d seen Kara – had reminded Kara vividly of the time they’d arrived home to find Lillian’s car parked out the front of their building. Both times Lena had jerked to a stop, something like panic in her eyes, though last night she’d only stilled until her companion ran into her back. They’d stumbled forward, Lena catching herself on the wall and her friend catching herself on Lena, and Kara had babbled out a greeting and something about going to bed in the same breath and retreated to her room to examine the cold, slithery feeling that had taken up residence in her gut at the sight of them.</p>
<p>“I think you’re overthinking it,” Alex tells her, shifting her pillow. “Lena’s your best friend, she would’ve told you if she’d got herself a girlfriend.”</p>
<p>“Even if they’re not together, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m reacting… that I’m feeling like <em>this</em> about it.”</p>
<p>Alex’s odd expression breaks, replaced by a concerned frown as she leans over to tug the covers back over Kara’s shoulders. “Kara, I am one hundred percent certain that whatever is going on with you right now isn’t homophobia.”</p>
<p>“But—”</p>
<p>“One. Hundred. Percent.” Alex eyes her for a long moment, her expression back to inscrutable. “You need to talk to Lena about it. At least find out if you’re freaking out over nothing.”</p>
<p>Kara squirms, uncomfortable at the very thought of having that discussion with Lena, but Alex has her ‘No, Seriously’ face on and Kara’s too wrung out to argue. “Okay. You’re right.”</p>
<p>“I’m always right,” Alex says, fighting off a yawn. “And as much as I love you, I also have to be awake again in four hours because I’m meeting Kelly for breakfast before work.”</p>
<p>Kara makes an excited noise in the back of her throat, and Alex shoots her a look.</p>
<p>“Don’t.”</p>
<p>“Don’t what?” Kara asks, utterly failing at keeping the smile off her face or out of her voice.</p>
<p>“Don’t say whatever it is you’re thinking that’s making your face do <em>that</em>. It’s just breakfast.” Kara grins at her, wide enough that Alex smiles despite herself before flipping onto her back and wriggling down until her head is just above the covers.</p>
<p>“A breakfast <em>date</em>,” Kara teases, and Alex reaches back to shove her lightly.</p>
<p>“Go to sleep, weirdo,” she mutters, and Kara lets her eyes drift closed as the uneasy feeling in her heart ebbs under a tide of warm affection.</p>
<p>
  <strong>…</strong>
</p>
<p>Returning to their shared apartment feels inexplicably hard, and Kara puts it off as long as she can. She has enough spare clothes at Alex’s to go straight to work in the morning, and an afternoon Supergirl emergency means she manages to delay going home until the mid-evening.</p>
<p>She hesitates in the hallway outside, oddly reluctant to enter, but after getting a curious glance from Mr Stein as he leaves on his weekly grocery shop, Kara steels herself.  Then wavers again with her key pressed to the lock, overcome with the ridiculous urge to knock on her own door. Finally, with an irritated huff at herself, Kara tugs her glasses down her nose and scans their apartment with her x-ray vision, relieved to find only one human-shaped blob with a familiar heartbeat.</p>
<p>Lena is curled up on the couch with her laptop, and she looks up when the door opens. Her face melts into a smile when she sees Kara, filled with so much genuine warmth that Kara can’t help but return it.</p>
<p>“Kara, there you are,” Lena says, her tone laced with concern and a hint of something else Kara can’t place. “You disappeared last night, I was worried.”</p>
<p>“Sorry,” Kara says, meaning it. “Alex had a thing.” It’s technically true, even if the thing was Kara showing up in her apartment in the middle of the night to hyperventilate.</p>
<p>“A Kara thing or…” Lena makes a swooping gesture with her hand, and Kara smiles.</p>
<p>“A Kara thing.”</p>
<p>“Is she okay?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, she’s fine.”</p>
<p>There’s a lull, and it probably isn’t actually as awkward as it feels, but Kara is acutely aware of the way Lena’s watching her. Alex’s insistence that she talk to Lena flashes back through her mind, and after inwardly steeling herself, Kara does so. Sneakily.</p>
<p>Looking around casually, like she doesn’t already know they’re alone, Kara asks, “Is your friend still here?”</p>
<p>“Nia?” Something flashes across Lena’s face, but it’s gone too quickly to decipher, even for Kara. “No, she left this morning.”</p>
<p>Nia. Even her name is pretty, Kara thinks, oddly angry about it. She kicks her shoes off and drops her keys onto the table with slightly more force than necessary, then winces and immediately feels guilty about it.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry if we were being too loud,” Lena continues, oblivious to Kara’s internal anguish. “Nia can get…enthusiastic. If I’d known you were home, I would’ve sobered us up before we got here.”</p>
<p>“No, you were fine,” Kara assures her, deliberately not thinking about the little she did overhear. “I didn’t hear—I mean I left not long after you got home. You didn’t disturb me.” After the whole Supergirl fiasco, Kara has an intense aversion to lying to Lena, and usually makes a concerted effort not to. But in this case, the little white lie feels important. The hour she spent tossing and turning and listening to the muffled giggling coming from the living room isn’t <em>that</em> long when compared to say, the age of the universe, and bending the truth a little feels easier than trying to explain the weird feeling that had lurked in her chest and finally driven her to fly out her bedroom window.</p>
<p>Lena smiles, twisting herself on the couch so she’s still facing Kara as she moves through the apartment. “I wanted to— I mean, if I’d known you were around, I would’ve invited you. I thought you were working on something with Winn.”</p>
<p>“I was, but we’d finished. It was nearly midnight when you got home,” Kara says distractedly. There’s a blanket slung over the back of the couch and a pillow from Lena’s bed shoved up against the arm, and Kara feels something cool and soothing flow through her when she realises that one of them slept out in the living room. It’s an oddly comforting thought, right up until her overactive imagination tacks on the possibility that they <em>both</em> slept on the couch, too caught up in each other to make it to a bedroom, and the weird clawing in her chest returns with a vengeance. Suddenly talking to Lena about this feels like a terrible idea.</p>
<p>“Oh. I didn’t notice the time. I guess we… Kara? Are you okay?” Lena asks, tilting her head with a concerned frown. “You look—”</p>
<p>“Fine! I’m fine,” Kara says quickly, plastering a fake-feeling smile on her face and backing towards her room. “Just tired. I—There was a Supergirl thing and Alex says I should rest so I’m…I’m just gonna go to bed.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Lena says, her face somewhere between confused and concerned as Kara backs into her room. “Goodnight.”</p>
<p>“Night!” Kara calls back around the closing door, then turns and sinks back against the wood. Her heart is twisting weirdly down in her stomach somewhere, and it takes her a moment to force the feeling from her mind. The sharp, clawing dance gets worse every time she remembers the look on Lena’s face last night, how she’d gone from laughing giddily to frozen when she’d seen Kara, and even after she pushes herself off the door to fall face-first onto her bed, the image of her expression remains painted across the back of her eyelids and follows her into fitful dreams.</p>
<p>
  <strong>…</strong>
</p>
<p>Kara is officially introduced to Nia almost a week later, entirely by accident. She’s on her way out, searching her bag for her phone and not paying any attention when she opens the door to find a familiar brunette with two coffees in one hand and the other one poised to knock. They both pull back, startled, and stare at each other dumbly for a few moments in frozen silence. Kara is struck by the fact that Lena’s girlfriend is extremely pretty, and something about that seems incredibly unfair.</p>
<p>Nia recovers first, dropping her hand down to offer it to Kara with an engaging smile. “Hi! Kara, right? I’m Nia.”</p>
<p>“Yes, hello,” Kara manages, taking the offered hand automatically. Nia’s palm is soft and warm, and her perfume is sweet in Kara’s nose, and Kara thinks forlornly that if only she hadn’t snoozed her alarm the second time, she could have left the apartment early enough that she’d have passed Nia in the hallway instead of meeting her at the door. They would’ve exchanged smiles, maybe a friendly nod at the most, and Kara wouldn’t be stuck hovering over the threshold of her own home, desperately trying to ignore the fact that Lena’s girlfriend is smiling at her and it’s igniting an odd, oozing frost down in her stomach.</p>
<p>“Lena’s told me so much about you,” Nia continues, and Kara wonders briefly if it would be rude to admit that Lena hadn’t mentioned Nia at all. Then she wonders if it would be rude to shut the door in Nia’s face and leave for work via the balcony, but she shies away from that idea as quickly as it pops up. Kara refuses to become one of <em>those </em>people, who spit and snarl and hate, no matter what the uncomfortable ache in her chest is telling her.</p>
<p>“Please, come in,” Kara offers instead, stepping to the side and gesturing Nia into the apartment. “Lena is—”</p>
<p>“Here,” Lena interrupts from behind them, and Kara turns to see her hurrying out of her bedroom looking oddly nervous. “Nia, you’re early.”</p>
<p>“It was bound to happen eventually,” Nia jokes with a grin, then holds the tray of coffees out like a peace offering. “I got you coffee.”</p>
<p>“Thank you,” Lena says, but her eyes are still flicking between Nia and Kara and her heartbeat is tripping in her chest. Kara frowns at her for a moment, concerned, and then has a horrible jolt of a realisation. What if Lena <em>knows</em>, has been able to sense how uncomfortable this is making Kara, has realized that her roommate is actually secretly a terrible person. The very thought is terrifying in a physically painful way, and it pushes at Kara’s feet without her conscious thought. She starts edging past Nia, grinning with far too many teeth, and Lena tilts her head.</p>
<p>“You’re leaving?” she asks, and Kara can’t tell if the undertone in her voice is one of relief or disappointment. She actually can’t read her at all, Kara realises when she glances back towards them; Lena has her face schooled to blankness in a way Kara hasn’t seen directed at her since their very first meeting, and the sight of it now, with her gaze flicking between Kara and Nia, is sharpening the ice in Kara’s gut into spikes of anxiety.</p>
<p>“Yeah, I’m super late for work. I mean, not <em>super</em> late. Just regular late—I have to go. Is the point. It was nice to meet you, Nia,” Kara forces out, hoping it doesn’t sound as false as it feels.</p>
<p>“You too! Will we see you tomorrow night?” Nia asks, and Kara stumbles over the threshold and turns back.</p>
<p>“Tomorrow night?”</p>
<p>“Game night! Lena invited me,” Nia continues, and Lena’s eyes widen a fraction before she visibly catches herself. “You’re coming too, right?”</p>
<p>“I, um…” Kara starts, looking to Lena for some hint of the right answer. The blank look is gone, replaced by a smile that’s not quite reaching her eyes, and when she nods, it’s in a sharp, jerky way that Kara hasn’t seen on her before.</p>
<p>“Of course she’ll be there. Right, Kara?” Lena asks, then reaches up to turn Nia towards her so she can reach the coffee still in her hand.</p>
<p>“Oh careful, it’ll still be hot—and you’re sculling it. Okay,” Nia says, and Kara takes advantage of the distraction to flee.</p>
<p>She ducks away, out the door and out of sight, managing to supress her very strong urge to throw herself out the window at the end of the hallway. She can’t resist risking a touch of superspeed, but Nia is distracted by Lena’s apparently charming lack of pain receptors in her mouth and Lena already knows that physics mostly only applies to Kara when she wants it to.</p>
<p>Kara is in the elevator and halfway to the ground floor before she hears Nia turn back and say, “Kara?” with confusion in her tone, then Lena hisses something that Kara doesn’t quite catch. Then Nia gasps and giggles and Kara starts humming loudly, ignoring the look she gets from Mrs Morris from the third floor. She keeps humming all the way to the ground floor, all the way out the front doors, all the way into the alley that runs behind their building. She keeps humming until she’s ten blocks away and two miles off the ground, and anything she might hear from her apartment is snatched away by the jet stream before it can reach her.</p>
<p>The thought of spending an evening in the same room as Lena and Nia – as Lena <em>with</em> Nia – is doing nothing to calm the curling, twisty thing that’s taken up residence in her gut. The thought of seeing them sitting together, hands intertwined and heads bowed toward each other, is doing nothing to sooth the anxious ache in her chest. The thought her friends’ reactions – of Winn trying and failing to act cool for them, of Alex and Kelly smiling at them knowingly, of James and Lucy and Sam teasing them fondly – actually sounds like a very specific form of torture, like being relentlessly tickled far past the point of it being funny.</p>
<p>But.</p>
<p>Lena had said she wanted Kara there, in a round-about sort of way, and before anything else, Kara is Lena’s friend. She’s always been Lena’s friend, and whatever the weird, clenching thing in her heart is telling her, Kara will stay Lena’s friend. Kara wants to go to game night, because Kara is Lena’s <em>friend</em>, and she’s going to be <em>supportive</em> and <em>happy for her</em> and <em>not</em> spend the night sulking on top of the tallest skyscraper she can find.</p>
<p>Kara will go to game night. It will be fine.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <strong>… … …</strong>
</p>
<p>
  <strong>ii. on judging one’s books, covered or otherwise</strong>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Kara goes to game night. It is not fine.</p>
<p>Technically, game night comes to Kara, because it’s their turn to host, so Kara doesn’t so much go as resists the urge to leave. She gets home from work and hovers around the apartment, fussing over the snacks and cleaning the already-spotless living room and talking herself out of faking a Supergirl emergency as an excuse to jump out of the window, and by the time six-thirty rolls around, she’s worked herself up onto the ledge of a nervous, manic spiral.  </p>
<p>The panic eases when the first person to arrive is Alex, and the first thing she says as she sweeps Kara into a hug is, “I brought you that altovian vodka that makes your face go numb if you drink too much.”</p>
<p>“Rao, I love you,” Kara says, making grabby hands at the flask Alex produces from her pocket and unscrewing it the moment it leaves her fingers.</p>
<p>“Woah-kay, no, we’re not doing that,” Alex says, tugging it back out of Kara hands when she goes to gulp it straight. “Face-numbing, remember? You drooling into your doritos isn’t attractive.”</p>
<p>“Al-ex,” Kara whines, giving her sister her best puppy-dog eyes, but Alex just shakes her head.</p>
<p>“No way, I remember last time. I don’t want to have to explain to Nia how or why I’m tugging you around the apartment like a balloon.” Kara smiles sheepishly at the memory, and Alex rolls her eyes and brushes past her into the kitchen. “C’mon, we’ll find something to mix it with that won’t explode.”</p>
<p>The next person to arrive is Lena, and she takes one look at the scene in the kitchen – Kara carefully tilting the mouth of the flask over a half-full glass of orange juice with Alex huddled behind her – and keeps walking towards her bedroom, not even pausing to kick her heels off.</p>
<p>“I don’t even want to know what you two are up to,” she says, but there’s a fond smile wrapped around the words. “I’m getting changed. Please don’t set fire to our apartment.”</p>
<p>Her perfume follows her like a lullaby, curling through the air and into Kara’s nose, and for some reason Kara finds it incredibly distracting. So distracting, in fact, that she doesn’t notice how far she’s tilted the flask until Alex yelps and grabs her wrist, pulling her away from the now-lightly-steaming glass. They both freeze, watching it apprehensively, but when the chemical reaction settles instead of exploding, they relax.</p>
<p>“Okay, I’m minding this now,” Alex says, reclaiming her flask. “You clearly can’t be trusted today.”</p>
<p>“I can so be trusted,” Kara starts, but before she can make her very convincing argument, there’s a knock on the door. Kara squints over her glasses to see who it is – because their friends tend to just let themselves in whether Kara wants them to or not – and freezes when she sees Nia’s blurry outline.</p>
<p>“<em>It’s her</em>,” Kara hisses, clutching instinctively at Alex’s arm in her panic. “What do I do?”</p>
<p>“Let her in?” Alex answers, wincing and prying at Kara fingers until she loosens them with a mumbled apology.</p>
<p>“But—” Kara glances around wildly. “Lena’s not ready yet. I’ll have to <em>talk</em> to her.”</p>
<p>“Ye-es,” Alex says slowly, looking at Kara like she’s insane.</p>
<p>“What if I say something terrible?”</p>
<p>“Just… don’t do that?” Alex says, like it’s that easy. Kara blinks at her, but Alex just shakes her head and forces the glass into Kara’s hand. “Calm down. Drink your juice. It’s gonna be fine.”</p>
<p>With that, she spins Kara around by the shoulders and propels her towards the door, and by the time Kara rights herself she’s close enough that Nia would’ve heard her and she has no choice but to open it with a smile.</p>
<p>“Nia! Hi!” Kara says, wincing internally. Her tone is alarmingly high-pitched, but Nia seems to take her welcome at face value and smiles at her warmly. “Please, come in.”</p>
<p>“Thanks. It’s good to see you again,” Nia says, sounding far less insane than Kara. “Is Lena here yet? She said she might get held up at work.”</p>
<p>“Oh, no, she’s here. She’s… somewhere around,” Kara says, gesturing vaguely towards Lena’s room as she leads Nia further into the apartment. “Oh, this is my sister—”</p>
<p>“Alex!”</p>
<p>“Nia?”</p>
<p>They both speak at the same time, and Kara stands frozen between them, confused by the real smile on Nia’s face and the relief dancing over Alex’s. “You two know each other?”</p>
<p>“We’ve met. Professionally,” Alex says, cryptic and completely unhelpful.</p>
<p>Before Kara can badger further answers out of her, the door swings open again to admit Kelly. Alex abandons them immediately to sink into her arms, embracing her like it hasn’t only been six hours since they’d last seen each other.</p>
<p>“I had no idea Alex was your sister,” Nia says, and Kara is about to swallow her pride and ask how they know each other when Lena wanders back into the room. She’s wearing her coming-from-work-casual clothes, which means she’s changed out of her suit and into her softest, most comfortable hoodie – one she’d she stolen from Kara, but she looked so relaxed in it that Kara had decided to pretend she hadn’t noticed – with her make-up wiped away and hair finger-combed out of its office updo.</p>
<p>Kara loves seeing her like this, all soft and relaxed and with a carefree smile on her face. It’s almost ritualistic, the way Lena removes her armour piece-by-piece, and Kara nurses a private, warm glow that she was the first one Lena trusted enough to see the in-between stages. One of the best things about them sharing an apartment, in Kara’s opinion, is that she gets to watch that transformation, from Ms-Luthor-the-Scary-Corporate-Mogul, who could silence an entire boardroom with a single glance, to Kara’s-Best-Friend-Lena, who could be wheedled into eating popcorn and thought nothing of sinking to the floor in a twelve-hundred-dollar dress to curl herself around Kara’s shoulders on the bad days.</p>
<p>Then Nia perks up beside her, trailing off from whatever she was saying about Alex and calling, “Lena!”, and Kara remembers with an odd swooping feeling in her stomach that the soft smile on Lena’s face probably isn’t for her.</p>
<p>“Nia! You made it in one piece,” Lena says, padding towards them and grinning when Nia engulfs her in a hug, and Kara whirls away before she has to see anything else. Her eyes land instead on Alex and Kelly, who have apparently forgotten there are other people in the room, and she keeps turning because that’s not better. There’s laughter echoing in the hallway outside, and Kara ends up facing the door just in time to see Lucy and Winn spill through it in a giggling heap, with James close behind them, shaking his head with a grin.</p>
<p>“Pre-gaming game night again, huh?” Alex says, pulling away from a blushing Kelly and visibly supressing a smile as Winn and Lucy both try to stand while leaning on each other, with mixed results.</p>
<p>“Just a bit,” Lucy says, getting her feet under her and stumbling towards Alex and Kelly until they catch her in a hug that’s part welcome and part support.</p>
<p>“It’s Lucy’s fault, she’s a bad influence,” Winn says at the same time, and Lucy glances over her shoulder to shoot him a look.</p>
<p>“Am not.”</p>
<p>“Are so.”</p>
<p>“Children,” Lena interrupts, though her stern look is dramatically undercut by her smile, “behave. This is Nia.”</p>
<p>As the others wave or murmur greetings, Lucy narrows her eyes, looking confused. “Wait, aren’t you—” she starts, but Alex yanks her backwards and hisses something in her ear. Kara doesn’t catch what she says because she’s too focused on the arm Lena has wrapped around Nia’s shoulder and the way the sight of it is sending painful tingles down her spine, but she does notice the slow, sly smile creeping across Lucy’s face. Kara’s been on the receiving end of that smile before, usually right before the general vicinity dissolves into a disaster zone, and the sight of it now, aimed between her and Lena and Nia, is igniting a whole other flavour of nerves in Kara’s stomach.</p>
<p>“Uhh, Kara? Whatcha drinking there?” Winn asks, pulling Kara’s attention away from the nascent chaos and onto the glass in her hand. The alien vodka has congealed in the juice, like half-set jello, and there are lumps bobbing in it that look distinctly un-pulp-like.</p>
<p>“Um, it’s… orange juice?” Winn blinks at her, and Kara continues quickly,” I think it’s off. I’m just gonna go find something else…” she says, taking the excuse to disappear into the kitchen.</p>
<p>By the time she gets there, the liquid in the glass has solidified into a jelly-like mass, and doesn’t move when Kara tips it above the sink. It stays stubbornly in place, wobbling slightly when she shakes it, and Kara stares at it and wonders if maybe there’s some symbolism there, something about getting too caught up in one thing and getting stuck. Or something.</p>
<p>Then she flinches and drops the glass altogether when someone speaks behind her.</p>
<p>“What’d you mix it with?” the voice asks, and Kara squeezes her eyes shut and steels herself for a moment before turning.</p>
<p>It’s Lena, leaning against the bench and watching Kara with a small, soft smile that Kara can’t help but return sheepishly.</p>
<p>“Altovian vodka. It was Alex’s idea.”</p>
<p>Lena rolls her eyes fondly. “Of course it was.” She pushes off the bench and moves to stand next to Kara, poking curiously at the contents of the glass. “If that’s the same thing that Winn got you on New Years, you need to use something sugar-free and carbonated.”</p>
<p>Kara smiles, but shakes her head. “I think I’m gonna stick to just juice. I’m pretty sure Alex has already cut me off.”</p>
<p>“Maybe that’s best.”</p>
<p>They fall into a comfortable silence, smiling softly at each other until the stillness is broken by a burst of laughter from the living room. Nia’s is loudest amongst them, and the icy thing in Kara’s guts stirs sluggishly, like a sleeping dog shifting positions. Kara tunes automatically into the conversation, hears Lucy recounting an embarrassing story at Alex’s expense, and tunes out again to find Lena watching her, her expression unreadable.</p>
<p>Kara frowns, sensing a change in her mood, and tilts her head in an unspoken question.</p>
<p> Lena hesitates, wrapping her arms around her stomach, then asks softly, “You’re okay, right? With Nia being here?”</p>
<p>The question sends a horrible, curdling wave through Kara’s entire body, like the time she got thrown into a tanker carrying used cooking oil, and she struggles to keep the feeling off her face. She’s not entirely successful, judging by how Lena unclenches and reaches for her, looking somewhere between nervous and apologetic.</p>
<p>“It’s just that you seem… I don’t know, quiet around her? She sort of invited herself when I mentioned that Sam couldn’t make it, but if you don’t want her—”</p>
<p>“No!” Kara almost yelps, catching the hand that Lena lays on her arm when Lena startles at the volume. “No, she’s great! I really like her!”</p>
<p>Distantly, Kara winces at how manic she sounds, but she can’t help it. Panic is stirring in her throat, fed by a desperate need to keep the slick, unkind feeling in her gut out of her voice.</p>
<p>Lena frowns, and she ducks her head to meet Kara’s eye more intently. “Kara, what’s wrong? You can tell me. Has she… did she say something, or…?”</p>
<p>Kara nearly tells her. There’s an oddly penetrating softness in Lena’s expression that sooths the aching thing in Kara’s chest, and that, coupled with her near-violent aversion to lying to her, means that Kara finds herself opening her mouth to spill absolutely everything.</p>
<p>Then closing it again just as quickly, because how does she tell Lena something like that? How can she frame the phrase ‘<em>seeing Nia with her arm around you makes me want to fly backwards out the window’</em> as anything other than a huge red flag that she’s a terrible person?</p>
<p>Lena must see her hesitation, because her hand slides down from Kara’s arm, skimming over her wrist to wrap around her fingers. Her thumb traces little arcs over Kara’s knuckles and her eyes are soft and so, so green, like a forest lake after a storm, and Kara opens her mouth again because nothing bad could possibly happen in a world where Lena is looking at her like that.</p>
<p>Then Lucy’s voice shatters the moment, echoing in from the living room and fracturing Kara’s hold on her resolve.</p>
<p>“Luthor! Come and tell your girlfriend what happened to the last person who challenged me to Strip Jenga!”</p>
<p>Lena flinches, like she’d forgotten they weren’t alone. “I am definitely going to regret introducing those two,” she says after a long moment, sounding oddly off-balance.</p>
<p>Kara is inclined to agree, but she’s more distracted by the way the word ‘girlfriend’ wraps around her chest and presses tightly. Their hands are still tangled together, and Kara catches herself looking at them with an odd feeling twining through her ribs.</p>
<p>There’s another burst of laugher from the living room, and this time they both flinch together. Lena closes her eyes briefly, then raises her voice to call out, “Lucy! Behave!” She gets an answering giggle and Lena shakes her head, then squeezes Kara’s hand gently. “When you’re ready, okay?” she says softly, then steps away, letting go in stages until she’s disappeared back through the door, leaving Kara feeling like she’s missed something significant.</p>
<p>
  <strong>…</strong>
</p>
<p>By the time Kara talks herself into going back into the living room, her friends are all settled on the couches and armchairs arrayed around the room. If tradition holds, most of them will end up on the floor by the end of the night, but for now, the only spot left is between Winn and Lena. Kara flops into it with all the enthusiasm she can muster, right into the middle of a Lucy Lane interrogation.</p>
<p>“So,” she’s saying to Nia, hints of that sly little smile around her mouth, “how did you two meet?”</p>
<p>“I’m a freelance writer,” Nia says. “Lena was working on a project that caught my attention, and I pitched her a feature on it. She agreed. The interview was… interesting.”</p>
<p>Lena rolls her eyes. “A now-ex-intern from my PR department thought the best way to get his famously PR-shy boss to actually talk to the big scary reporter was to lock us in the lab together for five hours. We bonded.”</p>
<p>Kara frowns as the others laugh. “You didn’t tell me about that,” she says, hurt, but Lena smiles softly at her.</p>
<p>“I didn’t want to worry you. It was while you were in Metropolis, and we were safe. Just bored.”</p>
<p>“I got lots of great material,” Nia continues, grinning. “Lena bribed me to keep the best bits to myself by taking me on a rich person pub crawl, and the rest is history.”</p>
<p>Kara forces herself to laugh along with the others, even though her stomach feels like its shrivelling in on itself.</p>
<p>“What can I say, I apparently have a soft spot for enthusiastic young journalists,” Lena says, nudging Kara with her knee as the others grin at them.</p>
<p>“Games!” Kara announces loudly, fighting down the inexplicable blush she can feel rising on her cheeks. “We should play some games.”</p>
<p>The usual good-natured jostling for teams follows, and Kara ends up paired with Winn. Lucy claims Nia almost immediately, which is concerning enough to distract Kara from her usual objections to Alex’s addition of <em>‘no roommates’</em> to their <em>‘no couples, no siblings’</em> rule, instituted after one-too-many victories attributed to what Kara called ‘good luck’ and Winn referred to as ‘blatant cheating’.</p>
<p>But despite her distraction, Kara is surprised to find herself having fun. Lena and Kelly easily dominate at Lightning Monopoly; Alex and James win Pictionary after Kara botches her drawing of ‘theatre’ when Nia nudges Lena and pulls a face and Kara snaps her pencil in half; and Lucy and Nia are disqualified from charades when Winn notices that they’re just signing the answers to each other.  </p>
<p>There’s lots of laughter and gentle ribbing, but under the warm glow of her friends having fun, Kara can’t shake her awareness of the icy feeling along her spine every time Lena leans familiarly against Nia’s shoulder, or Nia casually steals chips out of Lena’s hand. There are also the concerning moments when Nia and Lucy have their heads bowed together, whispering softly and casting appraising looks around the room, and Kara has to resist the almost-overwhelming urge to eavesdrop.</p>
<p>She avoids temptation largely through frequent trips to the kitchen, refilling drinks and topping up the snack bowls and giving into the impulse to sneak out the window and fly a very quick lap of the neighbourhood to calm down.</p>
<p>It’s after one such trip, when she’s coming back into the living room with a full bowl of chips and wind-ruffled hair, that she hears Nia say, “—been thinking about it, but getting engaged is a big step, so we want to make sure—”</p>
<p>“Engaged?” Kara squeaks, then blushes when everyone turns to look at her. “I just mean… you’re so young! You don’t want to tie yourself down too early, and you know studies have shown that people who wait to get married have a lower divorce rate and higher overall happiness so maybe you should think about…” She trails off as the others blink at her, then shrugs, jostling the chips. “What? I’m just saying.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Alex sighs into the silence, sounding tired and very long-suffering. “Come with me.” She stands and gently lifts the bowl from Kara’s hands, handing it to Winn before grabbing Kara’s hand and pulling her towards the door. The others watch them go with varying degrees of confusion, but when Kelly calls after them, Alex just flaps her free hand at her and tugs Kara out of the apartment.</p>
<p>
  <strong>…</strong>
</p>
<p>Once they’re safely ensconced in the hallway, Alex rounds on Kara, her legs twitching like she wants to pace but is stopping herself. “So I was gonna just let this play out because Kelly says that self-discovery is an important journey or whatever and to begin with it was kind of funny, but now it’s just too painful to watch.”</p>
<p>“What?” Kara asks, now thoroughly confused.</p>
<p>“This!” Alex says, waving her hand between Kara and the apartment. Kara blinks at her, nonplussed. “You genuinely have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”</p>
<p>Kara shakes her head, very confused, and Alex breathes out slowly.</p>
<p>“Alright. Close your eyes. Trust me,” Alex insists when Kara frowns at her, and Kara sighs through her nose but does as she’s told. “Okay, now picture Lena kissing Nia.”</p>
<p>Kara’s eyes fly open. “What? No!”</p>
<p>“<em>Trust me</em>, Kara. This will help.” Kara eyes her suspiciously, but Alex just taps her arm impatiently. “It’s like immersion therapy. It’ll help you get used to the idea.”</p>
<p>“Fine, but this is weird,” Kara mutters, closing her eyes again.</p>
<p>It’s not difficult to conjure up the image of Lena with Nia, though it feels like it should be considering Kara’s never actually seen it. It should be harder, imagining the two of them pressed closely together, Lena’s hands sinking into long hair, Lena’s mouth leaving smudges of blood-red lipstick over heated skin, Lena’s tongue –</p>
<p>“Can I please stop?” Kara ask plaintively, opening her eyes again. “This is really weird.” She’s intensely uncomfortable in a way she can’t articulate, and there’s a hot ball of <em>something</em> sitting directly over her heart, digging its nails into her lungs as she breathes.</p>
<p>Alex leans forward, an odd look on her face, and taps Kara’s chest. “That feeling, right there. What is it?” she asks, and Kara frowns.</p>
<p>“I don’t know. Bad?” Kara hedges, shifting uneasily. “You already know it makes me uncomfortable.”</p>
<p>Alex sighs and rubs her eyes, then drops her hand. “Okay then, one last try. Close your eyes again.”</p>
<p>“Alex…” Kara starts, but Alex frowns at her until she sighs and lets her eyes slide closed again.</p>
<p>“Good. Now, instead of Nia, picture yourself. Kissing Lena.”</p>
<p>As soon as she says it, that’s all Kara can see. Herself, where Nia had been moments before, wrapped around Lena so completely, so perfectly, utterly lost in the taste of her. Hands buried in dark hair and lips dragging across heated skin, tongues and teeth and a warm weight against her side in the morning. The two of them curled together on the couch on a rainy afternoon and waking to green eyes inches from her own and—</p>
<p>And oh, <em>that</em> feeling is one Kara knows. <em>Yearning</em>, deep and abiding, aching in her very bones and squeezing the breath from her lungs. Kara’s eyes fly open and she sags back against the wall, a hand flying to her chest as if she can physically catch the feeling burning in her heart while beside her, Alex nods.</p>
<p>“There it is,” she says, sounding smug and satisfied and completely unaffected by the way Kara’s entire world is shifting underneath her.</p>
<p>“Alex.”</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>
  <em>“Alex!”</em>
</p>
<p>“Yep.”</p>
<p>
  <em>“Alex I think I love her.”</em>
</p>
<p>“Yeah, I think you’re right.”</p>
<p>Kara rounds on her. “You knew!” she accuses, pointing a shaking finger at her sister.</p>
<p>“I suspected,” Alex corrects, not even trying to hide her amusement. “You’re not what I’d call subtle with the jealousy, Kar.”</p>
<p>“I’m not jealous,” Kara says automatically, then pauses. The feelings she’s been having lately – the cold, scaly ache in her stomach, the weird twisty way her heart would beat when she thought about Lena, the idle daydreams of flying Nia to Australia and leaving her there – do all feel vaguely familiar when Kara stops to think about it. “Oh, I <em>am</em> jealous.”</p>
<p>“Just a bit, yeah,” Alex agrees, still sounding far too entertained by the whole thing, and Kara blinks at her.</p>
<p>“You didn’t… You never…”</p>
<p>“Kelly said we should let you figure it out on your own to facilitate emotional growth and awareness. Or something.” Alex shrugs. “She made it sound like a very good idea, but I can’t watch the two of you stumble around each other anymore. It’s painful.”</p>
<p>“Kelly knows?” Kara asks weakly, and Alex grins at her.</p>
<p>“Pretty sure the only people who don’t know about you and Lena are you and Lena. Although, judging by what Nia said while you two were having your little moment in the kitchen, it might actually just be you,” she adds, and Kara freezes.</p>
<p>“What did Nia…” she starts, then trails off, covering her mouth as Alex shakes her head.</p>
<p>“No, no, don’t focus on the wrong part of—”</p>
<p>“Alex,” Kara whispers, wide-eyed and pale. “Alex this is <em>bad</em>.”</p>
<p>“It’s not bad.”</p>
<p>“I can’t be in love with Lena, she’s with Nia!”</p>
<p>“No, Kara—”</p>
<p>“This is gonna make it so much more awkward—”</p>
<p>“Kara.”</p>
<p>“—I could barely talk to them before, what if—”</p>
<p>“<em>Kara</em>!” Alex interrupts, putting both her hands on Kara’s shoulders to ensure her full attention. “Relax. This is the part of the conversation where I tell you that the reason I’ve met Nia before is because her <em>boyfriend</em> works at the DEO.”</p>
<p>“Her…boyfriend?” Kara echoes softly as her heart does a complicated little dance in her chest.</p>
<p>“Her boyfriend.”</p>
<p>“She and Lena aren’t…”</p>
<p>“I doubt it. If Brainy was involved in any sort of relationship flow-chart with <em>the</em> Lena Luthor, he’d definitely never shut up about it.”</p>
<p>“So… Wait… What did Nia say?”</p>
<p>“That somewhere around Lena’s fourth New York Sour, Nia asked about a partner and Lena said she broke up with her boyfriend because she was hopelessly crushing on a straight girl then spent twenty minutes rhapsodizing about her roommate’s arms.”</p>
<p>Kara’s brain completely short-circuits. “So… That’s… Lena’s single?”</p>
<p>“You’re her best friend, you tell me,” Alex says, ducking her head to eye Kara searchingly. “You okay there, Kar?”</p>
<p>“Lena’s single. I love her,” Kara says, her mouth simply repeating the two thoughts chasing each other around her rioting brain, and Alex grins broadly and squeezes her shoulders.</p>
<p>“That’s the spirit. C’mon.”  </p>
<p>
  <strong>…</strong>
</p>
<p>Kara follows Alex back into the apartment in a daze, only peripherally aware of her sister sinking back down next to Kelly and whispering in her ear. Kara stops abruptly in front of Lena, and her friend trails off from whatever she was saying to Winn to look at her.</p>
<p>“Hi?” Lena says after a long pause. Kara blinks at her, looks around at their friends, then reaches down to take Lena’s hand.</p>
<p>“Can I talk to you, please?” she asks, not waiting for an answer before she tugs Lena to her feet and towards the door.</p>
<p>“I…okay?” Lena says, sounding confused but allowing herself to be led anyway. An eruption of very unsubtle whispering follows them out the door, but Kara can’t focus on anything other than the way her heart is rattling up and down her ribcage.</p>
<p>Kara tows Lena out into the hallway, entirely distracted by how warm Lena’s hand is in her own, and guides her until she’s leaning against the wall where Kara had been moments before. Lena doesn’t resist, but her face is awash with confusion when Kara eventually turns to face her. Even confused, she’s unfairly pretty, and Kara finds she can’t look at her for long without the butterflies in her stomach forming a battering ram aimed directly at her heart.</p>
<p>Slightly lost and very overwhelmed, Kara turns and paces to the end of the hallway, whirls around when she gets to the elevator, paces back. Lena watches her with a mixture of confusion and concern, and when Kara finally stops in front of her, she raises her hand like she wants to hold her still. She’s barefoot and wearing Kara’s too-big hoodie, and Kara stares at her and wonders how it took Alex beating her over the head with it f0r her to notice how breathtakingly, earth-shatteringly beautiful Lena actually is. Or rather to realise that she’d noticed, because thinking about it, Kara discovers that the thought has actually been hovering at the back of her brain for a while, lost under layers of friendship and feelings that Kara wasn’t ready to poke at.</p>
<p>Then she wonders what Lena’s thinking, because Kara has been staring at her for almost a minute now, unblinking, and Kara can tell it’s starting to feel weird. And oh, this is the moment, the bit where she has to put the storm in her chest into words, and Kara isn’t anywhere close to ready.</p>
<p>“Nia is not your girlfriend,” is what she finally blurts out, and Lena blinks at her.</p>
<p>“No,” she says slowly, tilting her head.</p>
<p>“You are not dating her.”</p>
<p>“No?”</p>
<p>“She is not dating you.”</p>
<p>“Kara.”</p>
<p>“There is no dating going on.”</p>
<p>“Kara, are you okay?” Lena asks, pressing her hand to Kara’s cheek, and Kara has to hold back a slightly hysterical giggle.</p>
<p>“This whole time, I thought…” she trails off, then looks up to meet Lena’s concerned eyes. She’s closer, somehow, even though she’s still leaning against the wall. Close enough that Kara can see the mascara clinging to her eyelashes and the lipstick she missed in the creases of her lips, and oh, Lena’s not moving at all. It’s Kara who’s leaning in, swaying inexorably towards the edge of a precipice. Lena’s hand is still on her cheek, soft and soothing, and under that warm weight and Lena’s glittering eyes, Kara takes a breath, steels herself, and dives.</p>
<p>“Can I please kiss you?”</p>
<p>Lena blinks at her. Opens her mouth. Blinks again. “What?”</p>
<p>“I realised recently that I’d like to. Kiss you, I mean. And it’s totally fine if you don’t want to! But Alex just sort of hit me over the head with the fact that I’ve been insanely jealous of you and Nia and also that there was actually nothing to be jealous of but that the jealously probably meant something and there might be some feelings that I wasn’t processing but I’m processing them a lot now and—”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“—I realised that I can’t stop thinking about…what?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” Lena says again, a soft, shining smile creeping across her face, “you can kiss me.”</p>
<p>“Oh. Okay. Good.” There’s a light dancing in Lena’s eyes, and Kara’s never really understood that expression before. How could someone have a light in their eyes? But she gets it now, because she can see it in Lena, see the joy and relief and fondness and desire in every inch of her expression. Lena is absolutely radiant like this, glowing like a sunset over the ocean, and Kara isn’t sure if her breathlessness is because of Lena’s sheer beauty or the fact that she’s actually lost control of her mouth and is still talking. “Yeah, good. Okay. Goo—”</p>
<p>Lena’s thumb lands gently on her lips, and Kara freezes. “Kara.”</p>
<p>“Mmm?”</p>
<p>“Kiss me.”</p>
<p>So Kara does. They’re close enough that it doesn’t take much, just a slight tilt of her head to bring their lips together gently, and Kara’s brain promptly short circuits. If Alex circuitously pointing out her feelings had been her hitting Kara over the head, the first brush of Lena’s mouth is like being run over – in a good way – by a tank. The breathy little sigh that hisses out of Lena’s throat as her hand curls around Kara’s waist is like being pummelled by an entire friendly building. The fleeting swipe of her tongue is like being politely flattened by an asteroid of warmth and joy and <em>rightness</em>, and by the time they separate, breathless and grinning at each other giddily, Kara can barely remember living in a time when she was unaware of how utterly perfect Lena is.</p>
<p>“Let’s go somewhere,” Kara says, because she’s spent the entirety of her life up until now <em>not</em> dating Lena Luthor, and that’s a travesty that needs to be corrected as soon as physically possible.</p>
<p>Lena grins, letting out a breathy little laugh that washes warmly over Kara’s cheek. “Our apartment is full of people,” she points out, but Kara is undeterred.</p>
<p>“Kelly will make sure they don’t break anything. Probably. We should go out. To dinner. Or a movie. Or Paris!” Kara exclaims, distantly aware that she’s babbling but unable to bring herself to stop. “I could take you to Paris! My French is terrible but there’s this little café tha—mmmhhh...”</p>
<p>She’s cut off by Lena’s lips against her own again, and any thought that’s not related to staying like this forever abruptly vacates her brain. Lena’s hands slide to her shoulders, and one of Kara’s is curled around her hip. The other one is making a play for Lena’s hair, and when it gets there and her nails scratch gently over Lena’s scalp, the noise she makes at the back of her throat, along with the full body shudder, convinces Kara that they should definitely never ever leave this spot.</p>
<p>Lena apparently has other ideas. She pulls away and slides her hands down to twine their fingers together, and then pushes off the wall to lead Kara back towards the apartment.</p>
<p>“As much fun as that sounds,” Lena says, a little breathlessly, “right now, we’re going to go back into our apartment and play more games with our friends. I have no doubt they’ve been planning their teasing about this for months, it wouldn’t be fair to deprive them of that.”</p>
<p>“I guess,” Kara says, sighing dramatically, but just before they reach the door, she stops and tugs Lena towards her for one last kiss. Lena melts into the embraces, winding her arms around Kara’s neck and pressing so closely against her that Kara thinks she’d be able to hear her tripping pulse even without her powers.</p>
<p>“Afterwards, though,” Lena murmurs, speaking between peppered kisses, “we can <em>definitely</em> talk about Paris.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>plsss comment they're like hugs but with words. <a href="http://the-ominous-owl.tumblr.com">my tumblr</a> at me</p></blockquote></div></div>
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